


When All That's Wrong Is Right

by Ladycat



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s03e08 McKay and Mrs. Miller, Episode: s03e10-e11 The Return, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 05:31:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1182491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He has to do it," Rod says, clipped and fast and it's not right that he sounds so much like him. It confuses her and she doesn't know how to respond. "You can't let him not do it, okay?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s Jeanie who notices it first. 

Nebulous and tentative at the start, by the time it’s solid enough to be felt, if not named, she’s ashamed. Rediscovering her brother, the one she’s always, always wanted, is wonderful; it’s _perfect_ , every fantasy and half-wistful thought come to life.

It’s just not real.

Staring up at him in the hallway, animatedly discussing something she can’t remember, she wishes this was more abrupt. A single moment when everything goes click _yes_ , numbers and symbols pouring out of her like a wave she can’t stop, can only coast along and hope there aren’t rocks to batter against when she inevitably is bucked off. It’s not, though. Just a growing, steady feeling of _wrong_ that chokes her.

“I—I have to go,” she says, backing away abruptly. “I’m sorry.”

It makes her feel worse when Rod says nothing at all, watching her with too-familiar eyes that aren’t really familiar at all, as she hurries out the door.

* * *

Atlantis is beautiful at night, spangled stars in patterns she can’t recognize without Dad to point each one out, or Mer to tell him that of course he’s got it all wrong and this is the _right_ way, how could he be so stupid? Dad said it wrong on purpose, of course. Jeanie remembers the secret smiles and the silent, beautiful laughter framed in a dark beard, teeth flashing as they were ranted at. She misses him so very much. He wasn’t the best father, probably not even a very good one. Memories untainted and carefree are few and far between in the McKay family. 

He was hers, though. Her one and only.

The air smells of salt and another compound she remembers Mer telling her about, although she can’t remember the name of it now. It smells good, like the oils Caleb burns to help Madison sleep. Clean and fresh and _different_ despite knowing, with mathematical precision, just how minute the differences are.

Moonlight washes the balcony into shades of grey, but there’s still enough light to see the rich, artificial green of the mat in the center. She stands on it, spongy material wrong and prickling underneath her bare feet. Like grass, but not like. Not even like the astroturf she once walked on, at some long ago function, which had the benefit of being well-trampled by heels and cleats alike. The use made it feel almost normal, she remembers.

“Hey.”

She doesn’t bother turning around. It’s only been two days, but she can see some of why Meredith is so different and it’s not just because of the way Dr. Zelenka looks at him or the way Dr. Weir values his input. It’s because of this man, lanky and faceless in the shadows, hair a spikey call-sign as he moves to lean against the railing, a shadow that drifts into her line of sight.

“Hi,” she says, because she’s the polite one, even if she resents his being here as much as Mer would. Maybe less; Mer listens when this man speaks, a rare and precious occurrence. “Do you need this? Some midnight ritual you won’t tell the new kid?”

“Nah, you missed that. Ronon’s already cleaned up the dead chicken, too.”

For a moment, all she can blurt out is, “You have _chicken_?” because that is absolutely not what she was served at the mess, but then she shakes her head, waving away Sheppard’s chuckle before he can say anymore. She shifts her weight: left, then right. Right, then left. Her knees ache. She does yoga, has for years, but a bike accident when she was twelve has left an indelible mark.

“You okay? This can all be... kind of hard to handle.”

On the surface, he’s asking about Atlantis—another galaxy, wormholes, a side of life she’s never thought possible, let alone knew how intimately her family is connected to it. But Sheppard only seems all surface, she knows, and the trick of him is to figure out what he’s doing underneath.

“You get it,” she sighs, coming to stand beside him. The railing is warm to the touch. “Thank God. I thought it was just me.”

“Nah.” Sheppard’s head moves as he speaks, negative light she can trace almost without looking. He sounds genial, merry almost. She can feel how tense he is, how the _wrongness_ , maybe less overwhelming than her own but still present, disturbs him. “I’m kinda disappointed, I think. Rod is... cool.”

He is. He is very cool, very right, very perfect, and she wanted to take him home with her. To use him to soothe all the hurts and anger she still feels, simmering below the thrum of work she must deal with first, like when she and Caleb fight and Madison still has to be fed first, smiled at and reassured that nothing is wrong. The comparison makes her laugh, a tiny, broken sound, because she is not sure if she’s comparing Madison or Rod or even Sheppard, the man her brother warned away from her immediately, a growling bear of worry that Jeanie knows means _trust_.

“Hey,” Sheppard complains, teeth glinting in a smile she can see the outlines of, “that wasn’t supposed to be funny.”

“I know.” She calms, because she has always been good at doing so. She’s had to be, growing up with the overly excitable Meredith, who gets it from their mother who would forget the milk sitting warm on the counter when inspiration struck. Or her children, at day care or lessons or merely hungry and perturbed, upstairs in their rooms.

She breathes in, tasting the not-salt she can’t recall the name of. “It’s a little creepy. I think.”

“Not just a little,” Sheppard tells her, and there’s far, far too much to read in that genial voice so she doesn’t even try. Layers upon layers, each one peeling back to reveal more beside, infinite and unending. Has anyone seen the true core of him? “It was the golfing, for me.”

She nods, because while she doesn’t know this man she is bumping shoulders with, she knows Meredith and the kind of person he needs and has never found. “You wanted to teach him.”

Sheppard stills, almost completely motionless as his warmth seeps through the jacket over her shoulders. A bird is calling above them, soft trills to attract the fish it hunts for. “I shouldn’t be surprised you know that, should I?”

“No,” she says, remembering both their faces when Mer found out, turning away so that it was only Jeanie who saw Sheppard react. “You shouldn’t.” And then, a little later, “But you should still teach him. It’ll be funny.”

* * *

Dr. Weir is kind and accommodating and clearly wants to be friends with her, and Jeanie doesn’t like her at all. She’s a fine woman, probably, but she is everything Jeanie hates about political bureaucracies and there’s not enough time to separate that from Elizabeth. Mer can never understand that it was never just Madison or Caleb that made her leave, and Elizabeth reminds her too much of the head of MIT’s physics department, the one that tried to wine and dine and stiff-arm Jeanie back into academia. 

It’s a short enough tour that it’s not necessary to be friends, but it’s clear that Meredith thinks this woman caught and hung the moon; he has never hit on her, Jeanie knows, and never will. 

She wants to know Elizabeth Weir better, for his sake.

Still, she’s surprised when it’s Teyla who sets a tray down next to hers, because it is Elizabeth’s right at first crack and it seems odd that Teyla—an exotic figure Jeanie does not fully understand the place of, still—comes to her first. “The preparations are well?” she asks, formal and almost stilted, like Data and his inability to form contractions, but with a fluidity and grace Brent Spiner never mastered.

Jeanie smiles and pokes at something purplish and oblong on her plate. “We’ll know in a few more hours. Radek’s running simulations. Is this animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“A vegetable. My people do not like it, although I believe Colonel Sheppard says it is... tasty.”

Jeanie doesn’t make a crack about tofu, which she eats because it is healthy and Caleb and Madison both like it, and doesn’t tell either of them when she sneaks out for chicken McNuggets. The purplish, oblong thing tastes a little like jicama doused in chili oil. Somehow she swallows. She is proud when her eyes don’t water. “He’s right.”

The mess hall is nearly empty, only a few soldiers eating quickly as they head towards shifts or bed or whatever else they might be doing. Jeanie has no idea how the military functions and Meredith’s off-hand explanations— _The marines? Oh, they’re just grunts, who exist to eat us out of flying space-city, you don’t want to get to know them_ —only leave her more confused. The clink of silverware is soothingly familiar.

“Mrs. Miller,” Teyla says, “I wish to ask you something.”

Jeanie smiles, looking up at Teyla’s beautiful, serene face. This, too, is another woman Meredith has never hit on, excepting the obligatory crude comments among others. “Jeanie,” she corrects. “And is it about Rod?”

He is sleeping, more exhausted than his exuberance indicated. Jeanie saw it first, absently ordering them both to nap because they were cranky and useless without any sleep. Zelenka had grinned, the rest of the scientists entertained by how both men wilted under her sharp command; Rod accepted gracefully, if a little sullenly, while Meredith blustered and spluttered for the thirty seconds it took for him to realize that Rod had already left.

At the time, Jeanie had been as amused as the others. Relieved, almost, because how often has she compared Madison, who is as obedient as any three year old, to her stubbornly annoying and absentee uncle?

Now the memory leaves her faintly nauseated.

Teyla nods. Her eyes are lovely and trouble and cannot meet Jeanie’s, the first time that has happened since meeting her and pressing their forehead’s together in a weird, oddly intimate ritual Jeanie decides she likes. “It is.”

When she says nothing more, carefully edging off a pile of something that looks almost like mashed potatoes, if mashed potatoes were a pale, pretty blue color, Jeanie says, “I’m finding it kind of disturbing, myself. It wasn’t at first.”

“No. It was not at first. I—do not even know why I am asking you this, Mrs—Jeanie,” she interrupts herself, and her smile is sweet, even if her shoulders are still stiff and she is still staring at the formica table like the striated colors—greys and blues on pale pale cream—on it hold all the answers. Jeanie almost tells her the stars might be a little better. “You do not fully understand the dangers we face as members of Atlantis, both on this world and others. And yet... ”

Jeanie eats another piece of spicy jicama. “You thought you’d like to have Rod on your team, instead of Meredith.”

If there’s a betting pool on how often and in what ways Teyla loses her cool, Jeanie has just won the jackpot. She speculates on who she should ask and what kind of prizes a closed, moneyless system Atlantis could provide while Teyla takes a deep, centering breath and clears her face of the gobsmacked look of pure shock, immediately turning it into a narrow-eyed expression of deep suspicion.

Jeanie has always been a fan of Kitty Pryde or Nightcrawler, never Jean Grey, who Mer had lusted after with such enthusiasm. Being suspected of potential mind-reading or some other such invasion makes her feel as distasteful as she always imagined. She likes being given secrets, never taking them. “Ronon mentioned it, when I bullied him into showing me around Atlantis.” 

She can still feel that aching, tight feeling in her throat as she’d frantically looked around for Meredith, even though he’d been safely down in the lab, half a mile and more from where they stood. If he’d been there to hear that, to have those words echo over and over in his head the way they echoed in hers, louder with each repetition...

Mer doesn’t have as many insecurities as people think he does. He can’t afford to, and Jeanie has told only a fraction of the stories that have forced him into being uncaringly direct, an island separated from those who cannot understand or cannot abide the way he has always been. 

For all the whitewash Mer covers himself in, though, Jeanie knows where all the fault lines are, all the cracks he paints again and again. She helped refine them, after all. A sister’s prerogative.

“Foolish man,” Teyla hisses, like the cat her golden eyes remind Jeanie of. “Ronon would say such a thing aloud.” The irritation in her voice, a sharp, annoyed bark, is so different than her normal calm, ringing tones that Jeanie winces. She knows Teyla’s ire is mostly for Ronon, but they have _all_ thought it, one way or another. Knowing that someone has given air and breath to their most shameful musings is a blow that leaves Jeanie feeling as bad as she has ever accused Meredith of being.

Teyla misinterprets her frown and leans forward, conciliatory. “Forgive me, please,” she says, so sincere that Jeanie doesn’t have the heart to correct her, “that was inappropriate.”

Jeanie likes Teyla, likes the way she so casually thwapped her brother on his shoulder when he babbled too long at lunch. “It’s okay,” she says. The mess hall is quiet around them, providing no distractions. Her plate is almost empty. “Ronon was upset, too, if going statue-still and then hustling me along at warp-speed means what I think it does.”

“It may. Ronon’s moods are often indecipherable.”

“Unlike Meredith?” she asks, grinning to hide a sudden, sick thought that not once in her life has Jeanie ever doubted what her brother knew or felt, so long as he was there to say it to her. It is something she never knew she cherished. 

Teyla’s frown is as precisely masking as the _Mona Lisa_ ’s smile, beautiful and facile, hiding everything that flickers in her eyes. “Rodney hides little, yes. But I believe Rod is very different from him, in this.” When Teyla looks up, shame and dismay are mirrored there. Jeanie knows it for the gift it is, accepts the trust this woman gives her solely on the basis of being sister to one she has learned to believe in. “Rod wants very much for us to like him.”

Jeanie nods, because this is the puzzle piece she has missed, the idea she has hinted and danced around in her own mind. She _knows_ Meredith, inside and out no matter how often he denies this and does not understand her in return, and that understanding gives her enough to dissect Rod when he thinks he isn’t being watched. He is anxious and afraid, for all everyone else will see nothing but mulish intractability, or an easy, charming smile that Jeanie distrusts simply because it is so antithetical to what she knows and wants. Rod uses all the skills she wished her brother had learned, and seeing it, hearing it, being swayed by it—it isn’t _right_.

She knows Colonel Sheppard understands it, his quiet, disarming conversation from before proof enough, but she expects him too. She’s seen them together, read the body language Mer has never been able to hide from her, and gets the implacable connection they have, whether they are aware of it or not. That this woman, who is so alien in every word, likes and trusts and wants a man Jeanie loves because of the blood they share, fills her with relief. If Jeanie herself has often wished for a nicer, gentler version, she can imagine how difficult it must be for those who _could_ so easily replace or remove him.

“He really hates being called Meredith,” she says, absently stealing a fork-full of blue not-mashed potatoes, and grinning when Teyla only angles her plate for easier access; this is one of the few habits she shares with her brother. “I mean, really. He used to plan out the most elaborate revenges he could think of—and he _is_ a genius—when we were kids. By the second week of high school people would _flinch_ when he came near them, the pig-headed jackass. It’s a girl’s name,” she adds, because she hadn’t before, when she was too busy giving away all of his secrets. Rod isn’t the only one who wants to fit in, be accepted by these people. “Or it is now, and my parents kind of forgot that when they named him.”

“Ah,” Teyla accepts, busying herself with eating her dinner. Each bite is dainty, mouth closed as she chews, as regal and solemn as the monarchs and courtiers Great Aunt Lucinda used to tell Jeanie stories about. It makes her want to giggle, but she suppresses it. “Rod offers too much advice,” Teyla says finally. “It disturbs me.”

At this, Jeanie has to raise an eyebrow. “And that’s _different_ from Rodney?” The name always feels strange on her tongue. She has to think to say it, like a foreign language.

“Dr. McKay is not so kindly about it.”

Jeanie nods because she knows exactly what Teyla means.

* * *

There are too many people running around, voices raised in the kind of yelling she always imagined would come with being a physicist, back when she was ten and mixing comic books with scientific journals as she planned out her future. It is not at all appealing now. She can’t think with all the racket, red and blinking _null null null_ in her mind’s eye because she can’t bring herself to even think the words _destroying a galaxy_.

She squeaks when Rod grabs her arm and yanks her into a small supply room. “Are you insane?” she says to him, momentarily forgetting that this is not Meredith who will shout back, equally as incensed, but _Rod_ who instead looks abashed and a little ashamed among all that righteousness and she has never missed her brother so much.

“He has to do it,” Rod says, clipped and fast and it’s not right that he sounds so much like him. It confuses her and she doesn’t know how to respond. “You can’t let him not do it, okay?”

“Do what?” she snaps, but she knows, she already knows, she can see it in eyes as blue as her own and a mouth that does not slant downward enough. When he tells her anyway, cold and precise and logical, all she can think is that there isn’t enough arm-waving and hand-flailing and the emotions aren’t Richter level and they _should be_. But he’s looking at her, waiting on an answer, and she says the first thing that comes to her mind: “And what makes you think he’ll listen to me, anyway?”

Rod sighs, a heavy gust that is so unlike Mer that she stops reacting and starts thinking. The light above them makes the gel in his hair look stiff and pointed and she hates it a lot, even if there is a little more of it. “Because, kiddo, this is all about you.”

She stares. She can’t help it, because Rod believes everything he is saying with the same kind of certainty that usually accompanies phrases like _when I get my Nobel_ and _Jeanie, do it my way, you know I’m right_. Worse, he is so often right that Jeanie forgets that he still is, even when he’s wrong. “You’re an idiot,” she says, the way Meredith would’ve, cutting and _certain_ , no hesitations, and it feels good. She doesn’t let herself do this enough, because she is not Meredith; she is a McKay. “If you really believe that’s all of it, then you’re an idiot. And he has never called me ‘kiddo’.”

He blinks, surprised, because she has never acted sharply with him, the way his own Jeanie must have, and she can see how this throws him for a loop. It’s a familiar reaction, pre-planned conversations going wildly off track leaving Mer uncertain and fumbling, but Rod recovers faster, more nimble on his feet when there are no insults to shout.

“Jeanie, I know he misses you and he hates what’s happened,” Rod says, still blinking in surprise even as he continues the rest of his speech. It lacks enthusiasm, though, conviction leaking out like helium. “If you tell him you want me to stay—”

“I’d never tell him that.”

Jeanie McKay is younger than her brother by more than five years. She is not as smart as him, lacks his drive and ambition, but she has other things he doesn’t understand enough to be jealous of. She wasn’t surprised when his teammates—his _friends_ , and isn’t that a shock—told her of all the things he has done for Atlantis, all the ways he has browbeaten everything around him to make sure people stay alive, only belatedly remembering he wants credit. His friends speak of that momentary pause—sometimes only microseconds long, but _there_ —when he is so happy that it worked, that everyone is all right, in tones of wonder because to them it is the downbeat, the off-moments when he is no longer the Rodney McKay they complain and groan and whine about, but something else entirely.

His sister knows better. Knows _best_.

“This isn’t about me,” she says, smiling because Rod is Meredith enough that she likes being right when he is wrong. “Not totally. Not even mostly, although that’s all he can see right now because I’m here to feel guilty over. You should’ve talked to him first, you know. The next time this happens, forget about making all his friends like you, forget about being invaluable and brilliant, and talk to him first. He would’ve, if this were flipped.” The words are aimed at herself more than Rod, but they’re no less true for him. He _should have_ just like she should have, forcing past Mer’s bluster and fear to have the conversation Jeanie’s going to force one way or another before she leaves.

“He never would’ve given up on getting back to his own reality,” she hears herself saying, because Mer never understands subtly and sometimes you needed bricks. “He never would’ve given up on his friends, too busy trying to make new ones.”

“You want me to go.” It’s not quite an accusation, only the barest hint of righteousness left in him. Meredith is a sore loser at the best of times, but it is still better than this, than Rod who is folding down and in like a pocket of subspace collapsing into nothingness.

Meredith has never been nothing, not even when he was so far away he might as well have been. “I want my brother,” she says, and when, later, Mer tells her the plan, she has to keep herself from grinning even as she argues how risky and foolish it is.

* * *

Watching the death-note almost undoes her. She is flush with victory and happy that Sheppard has dropped by. She hopes he’s there to tell her something else, and the unspoken confirmation—there is only one way he has seen this video, after all, and not because he is ranking officer; Mer’s too good at hacking to allow that—is almost lost under the crack of Mer’s voice. It’s humbling, to see him this lost, this frightened, looking up at her through pixilated years.

She’s never seen him regret anything, before, and she almost wishes that it was anything but her.

Almost. She’s still hurt at four years of abandoned silence enough to take comfort in it, even as she sniffles.

“You can’t tell him I showed you this,” Sheppard tells her, rough and warm, a blanket washed too many times. “I just thought you should see.”

She doesn’t tell him that this is just icing, unnecessary and makes her teeth ache. He won’t know that she always eats the icing first, and usually goes back for seconds. He won’t understand, the way Rod couldn’t, that it isn’t really about her at all.

“You have to fix this,” she tells him fiercely as Mer’s voice breaks again, wishing for closeness, and she refuses to let herself cry. “Please. He thinks—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sheppard says, his smile boyish and beautiful and so full of love that she doesn’t know how anyone else misses it. She’s glad, though. She likes treasure. “I’m pretty good at wrangling McKay when he needs it.”

Teyla has told her something similar, although hers was a stout promise to aid Rodney’s quest to eradicate the word Meredith from their minds. And a thank you for telling stories about _their_ Rodney, the one who sometimes needs to be reminded that he is only human: _I promise not to tease him any more than he deserves,_ she had said.

He’s going to be teased a lot.

He’ll survive it, though, and secretly like it the same way he secretly likes it when she calls him Mer without thinking because it’s his name, and she isn’t the only one who likes treasure. So when Sheppard leaves and Meredith hugs her, warm and solid and so big around her that she feels small again for the first time in years, she tells him that yes, she is happy, and she doesn’t ask if he is, as well.

She already knows he is.


	2. Where the Hearth Is

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A coda, set directly after Return I

Madison loves numbers. They dance and sing for her, complex equations simple to her curious eye. She loves looking over her mother’s work, asking questions about this, poking at that, imperiously deciding that one particularly line, the one that’s taken all morning to figure out, is wrong, wrong, wrong, a phrase she’s picked up from overheard phone calls, even funnier because it’s normally Madison who’s wrong and she never cares; she just likes saying the words.

“Maddy,” Jeannie says, “go to your room.”

Kaleb pokes his head out of the kitchen, curls tumbling brown against his forehead, soap bubbles glittering iridescent and translucent where he’s pushed them back “Hon, what’s she—oh. Madison, come on. Time for your bath.”

There’s the usual clamor that almost covers up the sound of the doorbell ringing—baths are for lesser children than her daughter—but Kaleb is firm and Madison’s only just turned five. She’s no match for her wily father, yet.

“I bought this.” Something wrapped only in a white-and-red target bag is thrust into her hands. “It’s probably not right, so you should look at it first before giving it to her. I can—I’ll go out and get her something better tomorrow.”

 _Tomorrow_ implies a lot of things. The plastic feels too smooth against her fingers, slippery as she tries to get a hold on the mysteriously-shaped lump within. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Come in, Mer.”

“I’ve got a hotel room,” he says, but comes inside anyway. His shoulders are slumped, weighted, mouth dropping so far that he looks like a stroke-victim, a cloud of bitter exhaustion making her choke like it’s exhaust, back-washed from an ailing car. “I should go there.”

“No, you shouldn’t.” She has no idea what’s going on, but one thing she _does_ know is that if Meredith is here, looking like this, then it’s bad. It’s the worst possible, because Mer is the original Energizer Bunny, going and going until he’s burned up everything inside of him. She’s been to every single one of his graduations and she knows the true definition of ‘running on empty’. “Here, sit down.”

Mer ignores her, instead peering at the sheets of paper scattered over the sofa. He hmms at two of them, batting her hands away when she tries to take them. “This is good. I didn’t, ah. That is. Colonel Carter said you were still dabbling, but I didn’t—”

“Is it Colonel Sheppard?”

His head snaps up, utter shock keeping him blank-faced and vulnerable. “What?”

“Colonel Sheppard,” she presses, using her advantage to retrieve her papers and push him down onto the sofa. He bounces. “Is everything all right with him?”

“What? I presume so, I think he’s back at Cheyenne, he talked about getting his own team although he’s less than enthusiastic about it, but I suppose that’s to be expected...”

He’s rambling, chaotic and nearly unintelligible, but Jeannie lets him. Mer’s often his own little dam, storing things up until he’s well past critical. It’s not healthy, but it’s very much the McKay way—if Colonel Sheppard’s not ‘wrangling’, then he doesn’t have a Kaleb who’ll poke and prod and stay quietly supportive while she struggles to put her thoughts into recognizable words.

Kaleb’s taken to leaving large, empty notebooks around the house. Just in case she needs them.

“Meredith.”

“Can you _never_ call me Rodney?” His voice breaks, as lost and empty as the eyes that won’t meet hers.

Jeannie sighs and takes both his hands into hers. The skin is hard, calloused from events she doesn’t want to think about, but damp and chilled as she curls her fingers tight. “No, Mer, I can’t. You’re my brother. You’re Meredith.”

“It’s not fair.” He’s not talking about his name, and she knows it; silence is what’s necessary here and she gives it to him, tight and aching in her chest. “We did everything right. Well, okay, obviously we’ve made more mistakes than a blind, autistic child who needs television to put the pieces together, but we did do a lot of things right. We got her up and running and Jeannie, you’ve seen her—she _sings_ when she’s happy. I know you heard it, because she was, she _was_ with us, I know it, and now she’s off singing operas with someone else and it’s not _fair_.”

“Hey.” Jeannie puts her hand to his cheek just like he used to when they were little, when she fell and scraped her knee; just like she does now, when Madison comes in wobbly-lipped and teary.

He looks up, the most perfect expression of heartbreak on the face of a man who doesn’t know how to cry. “They took her, Jeannie. They sent us—here. They kicked us out.”

She doesn’t ask who they are, because it’s irrelevant. She knows who _she_ is, and why Mer says ‘here’ and not ‘home’, because he’s just been thrown out of it. Her brother isn’t one for hugs but when she opens her arms, cheeks already wet for him, he collapses against her, too big and bulky compared the man she usually holds, but as familiar as the blanket Madison uses, the one that still smells like their mother. She holds him, the way she does her daughter and her husband, accepting this gift for exactly what it is—a gift.

“A man can have many homes,” she tells him later. He’s dragging a fork through cinnamon-dark apple pie, unable to take more than a few morose bites. If she wasn’t already concerned, this would convince her. “You know that, Mer, right?”

He lifts his head, dull and listless, eyes so bloodshot that each blink must hurt, taking in her tiny kitchen with the blue walls and crazy, rainbow tiles behind the sink, Kaleb and Madison’s idea of a splash-back, the rickety chair he sits on and the table sanded smooth as silk, full of the sunshine it was created under.

“Is that the English Major’s influence?” The crack is half-hearted at best and he actually winces. “I mean, yeah. I—I do. I still have my apartment.”

Really, she thinks, rolling her eyes. It’s a good thing she loves the stubborn bastard. Sitting down across from him, she steals first the fork then a fork-full of pie, making sure to _mmm_ her theft. “Idiot,” she says, but her own throat is scratchy from crying and her cheeks are red and swollen. “That’s your apartment. _This_ is your home.”

“I’ve only been here once before.”

She could stab him with the tines of her fork, but then he’d overreact and she doesn’t want to have to start all over again. “Doesn’t matter, Mer. This is still your home.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call first.”

Smiling against eyes that blur and sting, she forces herself to laugh. “No, you aren’t.”


End file.
